Mindfulness at every turn

As Soren Gordhamer patiently quieted a packed Wisdom 2.0 event in San Francisco for a guided meditation, a few in the communal meeting space known as the Hub couldn’t resist thumbing another message or two before pocketing their sacred devices. Even after Gordhamer, tall with a sculptural face and Errol Flynn hair, urged the group to “come into presence,” his voice rising in emphasis, someone’s phone was buzzing like a dragonfly.

Gordhamer started Wisdom 2.0 in 2009 to examine how we can live with technology without it swallowing us whole. The wait lists for his panel talks and conferences now run into the hundreds.

Participants at a Wisdom 2.0 event in San Francisco, Sept. 30, 2013. Founder Soren Gordhamer's classes, where he promises to help technophiles learn how to live a more mindful, less plugged-in life, have a strong following. [CREDIT: Heidi Schumann, for The New York Times]

The “Disconnect to Connect” meet-up was typical. The audience was mostly young, mostly from the Silicon Valley tech scene and entirely fed up with taking orders from Siri.

“There was a time when phones didn’t tell you to do everything,” Gordhamer, 45, said as the conversation got rolling. “What’s work, what’s not work, it’s all become blurred.”

And yet, the problem may offer a solution. Loïc Le Meur, a French blogger and entrepreneur and the evening’s guest speaker, recommended a meditation app called Get Some Headspace. The program bills itself as the world’s first gym membership for the mind.

“It’s a way to have a meditation practice without feeling weird about it,” Le Meur said. “You don’t have to sit in a lotus position. You just press 'play’ and chill out.”

That morning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Chade-Meng Tan, a veteran engineer, was laughing about the demand for an in-house course he created called “Search Inside Yourself.”

The seven-week class teaches mindfulness, a loose term that covers an array of attention-training practices. It may mean spending 10 minutes with eyes closed on a gold-threaded pillow every morning or truly listening to your mother-in-law for once. Google naturally sees it as another utility widget for staying ahead.

“Whenever we put the class online, it sells out in 30 seconds,” Tan said.

This is not just a geek thing. Everywhere lately, the here and now is the place to be. George Stephanopoulos, 50 Cent and Lena Dunham have all been talking up their meditation regimens.

“I come from a long line of neurotic Jewish women who need it more than anyone,” Dunham, who’s been meditating since she was 9, told a capacity crowd last month at the David Lynch Foundation for Conscious Based Education and World Peace in New York. Then there was the tweet in April from Rupert Murdoch, who announced: “Trying to learn transcendental meditation. Everyone recommends, not that easy to get started, but said to improve everything!”

The Marine Corps is testing Mind Fitness Training to help soldiers relax and boost “emotional intelligence,” buzzwords of the hour. Nike, General Mills, Target and Aetna encourage employees to sit and do nothing, and with classes that show them how.

As the high priestess of the fully aware, Arianna Huffington this year started a mindfulness conference, a page dedicated to the subject on The Huffington Post and a “GPS for the Soul” phone application with a built-in heart sensor to alert you when you’re calm or stressed.

The hunger to get centered is especially fervent in the cradle of the digital revolution. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz told Wisdom 2.0 audiences about modeling his current software startup, Asana, after lessons learned in his yoga practice.

“This isn’t the old San Francisco hippie fluff,” said Tan, who started the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute in 2007. More than 1,000 Googlers have gone through the course, which uses scientific research and the profit motive to entice coders and programmers to be here now.

Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies verify the benefits of mindfulness training. Meditation thickens the brain’s cortex, it lowers blood pressure, it can heal psoriasis and “it can help you get a promotion,” Tan said.

Tan’s official Google title is Jolly Good Fellow, which nobody can deny. During the interview, he sat cross-legged and barefoot at a table inside the Googleplex, and was never far from an enlightened one-liner.

“People come to me with profound concerns like how do you get through 211 items on your to-do list,” he said. “I tell them, one item at a time, duh.”

Last modified: November 19, 2013
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